Dead Perfect

She stared at the mirror for a long time, her stomach in knots.

It was true. She was a vampire. She had known it before, of course, there was no longer any denying it, but it was suddenly a cold, hard fact, one she felt in the deepest part of her being.

Vampire.

Undead.

She remembered reading somewhere—had it been in one of Ronan’s books?—that vampires cast no reflection because they had no soul. Could that be true? Had she lost her soul as well as her humanity?

She felt different, inside and out, there was no doubt of that, but she wasn’t a soulless monster, was she? She was still Shannah.

Wasn’t she?

Her makeup forgotten, she went downstairs to wait for Ronan.

Ronan paused outside the front door of the house where he had lived for the past seventy years. He hadn’t had a case of nerves like this in over five centuries. How could he bear the hatred he was sure to see in her eyes? Maybe he was making a mistake. He’d had no one to ease his way into his preternatural life. He had learned what he needed to know to survive as a vampire on his own. No doubt Shannah could do the same. But he could not abandon Shannah as Rosalyn had so callously abandoned him.

Taking a deep breath, he knocked on the door.

Moments later, Shannah stood before him, looking more lovely than he had ever seen her.

“Come in,” she said, her voice cool, aloof.

He followed her into the living room, sat where she indicated.

A taut silence stretched between them.

“You must have questions,” he said at last.

“Have I lost my soul, Ronan? Am I damned now?”

“Why would you think that?”

“I looked in a mirror. There was no one there.”

It was a frightening experience. He remembered the first time it had happened to him, the sick feeling in his gut, the sense of loss.

“Am I damned, Ronan?”

“I don’t know,” he replied honestly. “But I don’t think so. What have you done to deserve damnation? You didn’t ask to be a vampire. If anyone is damned, it’s me.”

For all that she hated him for what he had done, the thought of his being forever damned distressed her more than it should have.

“Questions,” he repeated. “You must have others.”

“What? Oh, yes, but I don’t know where to start.”

“As you already know, your sense of sight and hearing are vastly increased. This holds true for all of your senses. You have many powers,” he went on. “Some of them you’re already aware of. Others will come to you in time. Some of them, like dissolving into mist, seem impossible or unbelievable, but you can master them all, with practice. You can move so fast as to be virtually invisible to mortal eyes. You can change your shape…”

“What do you mean?”

“You can assume the shape of animals.”

“Like a bat?” she asked, remembering all the old Dracula movies she had seen.

“A bat?” he asked, obviously amused. “Why would you want to be a bat?”

“I don’t know. In the movies…”

“Ah, the movies. I don’t know if you can turn into a bat. I’ve never tried. Much easier to turn into something larger, like a wolf. As I was saying, you have many supernatural abilities. You can climb up the side of buildings as easily as a spider, call people to you, mesmerize them with a look, wipe your memory from their minds. If you get hurt, you will heal almost immediately.

Few things, save the sun or pure silver, can do you serious harm.”

“What about garlic and being unable to enter a church, and stuff like that?”

He shook his head. “Stoker and the Hollywood crowd are responsible for all that nonsense.”

“And a stake through the heart?”

“That will destroy you as surely as the sun.”

She regarded him a moment. “I want to see you dissolve into mist.”

He nodded and then, almost before she could blink, he was gone and in his place there was a shimmering mist of silver-gray motes. She felt her heart skip a beat as the mist moved over her until it surrounded her. Warmth engulfed her and with it, a feeling of pure love. She felt bereft when it floated away, then hovered in the center of the room.

A moment later, Ronan stood before her again.

“Unbelievable is right,” she murmured. “But how do you do it?”

“Mind over matter, that’s all it is. You think it, believe it, do it.”

Closing her eyes, Shannah pictured herself turning into a mist of pale pink motes. At first, she felt nothing and then, abruptly, she felt lighter than air. Looking down, she saw that her body had disappeared and that she was hovering in the air over her chair. She could see and hear, but everything seemed hazy and far away. She willed herself toward Ronan, let herself brush against him. It was an odd sensation. She was aware of sliding over something solid but she had no sense of actually touching him. She drifted around the room, thinking how odd it felt to be weightless and without form, yet able to think and observe. She floated up to the ceiling and stayed there for a few minutes, just because she could. Was this what it felt like to be a ghost, she wondered, or was it perhaps the way one’s soul felt when it left the body on its journey toward heaven. Or hell.

Drifting down towards the floor, she was overcome by a sudden fear that she wouldn’t be able to assume her own form again, that not only had she lost her soul, but her physical form as well, and that she was now doomed to spend the rest of her existence as some soulless, formless non-entity. Panic flowed through her and she felt herself bouncing aimlessly around the room, careening off the walls, the ceiling, the furniture. She would have screamed, had she been able.

“Shannah, relax!”

Ronan’s voice. She turned toward it, her panic growing.

“You must concentrate,” he said. “Listen to my voice. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Form an image of yourself in your mind, and your body will take on its own shape once again. Yes, yes, that’s right.”

She landed on her feet on the floor, hard. She blinked at Ronan, then ran her hands over her arms, her face, down her sides, remembering a scene from the remake ofThe Fly where an experiment had gone horribly wrong and the animal had emerged from the chamber inside out.

Were all her molecules and atoms back where they belonged?

Deciding that everything seemed to be in place, she breathed a sigh of relief. “I don’t think I like that very much.”

“It’s always frightening the first time.”